A few years back when I started working at my summer job I was driving the shitty little Zodiac (think this but smaller) and had a pretty close call with danger. The motor on the boat had a notoriously loose tiller (the steering part) and it was one of my first times driving it. Wellllllllll. I'm driving along and hit a small wave, correct, but the loose steering causes me to over correct, etc until Im swerving back and forth. Here is the back angle of a zodiac. So what ends up happening, is the side to side jolts knock my kill cord (the thing that kills the engine when you fall out of the boat) off my leg. Im hanging off the back corner of the boat on the back nipples of the pontoon. My arm goes in the water and Im barely hanging onto the boat to keep myself from falling in. Hopefully the closest I ever come to losing a hand. I'd give more details, but it was one of those holy fuck situations where instinct kicks in and I don't remember much of it. Just know I have my hand and nobody else got hurt.
Given some people's stories, I thought this would be an interesting place to point out that, psychologically, people have very different reactions in life-threatening situations that are caused by non-attackers (e.g. natural disaster, car accident) v. an attacker (e.g. robber, terrorist). The book The Unthinkable details the psychology behind disaster scenarios very extensively. A SWAT medic recommended it to me and told me it would save my life one day, and it has definitely been one of the most influential books I've read. In either case, I've been in life-threatening situations often enough that it doesn't really phase me anymore. I can think of 10-15 near death experiences, off hand. But, most of those situations were either rock climbing related or car accident related—I've never had anyone seriously threaten my life. I'd like to think I'd react well in that kind of situation, but there's no way to know.